FEDI: Open-Source Freedom Technology, Community & Trust - Obi Nwosu (Bitcoin Talk on THE Bitcoin Podcast) - THE Bitcoin Podcast

Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
So when you take these two things together,

(00:01):
this decentralized community super app
combined that takes the best,
the current best freedom technologies
and merges them into one
in this pretty incredible user experience.
And then you take this Fedai order,
which is the decentralized genius bar,
that is a solution that we, even though it's very early,
we've been very excited about what we've seen
in terms of adoption.
And the final thing that you now know

(00:23):
from the announcement is that
even though we have built a product
which we believe has the potential to be
one of the most sophisticated
and advanced wallet experiences,
definitely over time,
comparing favorably with other commercial wallet offerings.
We have taken the decision to make the entire Fedai app.

(00:44):
Over time, it will become completely open source,
starting with a business source license
where it's immediately as of today,
source available, and over the coming months,
it will eventually become fully AGPL open source.
So that we don't just use the best freedom technologies,
the Fedai app itself becomes a freedom technology.

(01:04):
["The Bitcoin Podcast"]
Greetings and salutations, my fellow plebs.
My name is Walker and this is The Bitcoin Podcast.
The Bitcoin time chain is 855654.
And the value of one Bitcoin is still one Bitcoin.
Today's episode is Bitcoin Talk,

(01:25):
where I talk with my guest about Bitcoin
and whatever else comes up.
Today, that guest is Obi Noosu.
Obi is the CEO of Fedai,
and today Fedai just officially launched globally.
You can head to fedai.xyz and download their app right now
as well as watch their launch announcement video.
If you're not familiar,
Fedai is a decentralized all-in-one freedom tool super app

(01:49):
that allows you to connect with your community,
chat privately with friends,
send money and share information all in one place,
using the best available freedom technologies.
Bitcoin, the Lightning Network,
the Fediment Protocol, eCash, Noster and Matrix.
We recorded this episode last night,
so I have been itching to share this with you all,

(02:10):
because if you saw Fedai's announcement today,
they are on the path to go fully open source,
making their incredible platform
that they've spent a lot of time and effort developing
available for everyone.
Obi digs into Fedai going open source
and why that's so important.
Talks about the live projects that they have going,
covers their current technology stack

(02:32):
and the possibilities for all the things
that can be built on this in the future,
and why this technology is so dang important.
Obi also discusses communities
and the fact that they are a superpower
and why trust within communities is a feature, not a bug.
We also go deep on the store of value
versus medium of exchange debate,

(02:53):
and I know you're going to love this episode
and you will definitely learn a lot.
Congrats to Obi and the entire Fedai team
for all the work that they've put into this
and going live with it today globally.
Before we dive in, do me a favor and subscribe
to the Bitcoin podcast, wherever you're listening
or watching, and do me another favor
and check out my sponsor Bitbox in the show notes,

(03:14):
or go to bitbox.swiss.walker
and use the promo code Walker for 5% off
the fully open source, Bitcoin only,
Bitbox 02 hardware wallet.
Or you know, get yourself some steel wallet backups.
You can also grab links in the show notes
to protect yourself from sim swap attacks
using Iphani and cloaked wireless.

(03:34):
You decide which one you want.
I am a one man show, so when you use my partner links,
it genuinely helps me keep the show running
and I really appreciate it.
If you'd rather watch this show than listen,
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(03:56):
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Finally, if you are a Bitcoin only company
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Without further ado,
let's get into this Bitcoin talk with Obi.

(04:17):
Obi, thank you so much for joining me.
It's a pleasure to have you here and to see you again,
although not at a karaoke bar this time.
Yeah, not at a karaoke bar this time,
but thank you and it's a pleasure to see you again.
And yeah, that was a great time in Nashville at the end

(04:38):
and really enjoyed it.
An amazing thing where you've got developers,
entrepreneurs, pledges,
more generally and just about every one you could imagine
all singing at the top of their lungs.
My voice was gone for a few days after that,
so it's coming back slowly.
Yeah, I made the mistake of going to the karaoke bar,
the same one, Santa's pub the night before,

(05:00):
and then I had to speak on stage.
And then I went back again.
And so yeah, I lost my voice probably about a day after.
But it was worth it.
And I think there's just, I made a promise to myself
that I would sing more often at the beginning of this year.

(05:21):
And also, I probably next year will make a promise
to try and dance more often.
When I was younger, I used to dance a lot and sing a lot.
I'm not saying I'm a good singer.
I'm not saying I'm a good dancer, but I just enjoyed it.
And it's, so I think I'm doing a good job this year
of singing more often.
I mean, you definitely,
you definitely got a good amount of it in just that weekend.

(05:43):
So that's impressive.
Well, just to start us off here before we kind of dig into FETI
and what you guys have going on right now,
because it's a very big week for you.
Can you start us off with just generally, who are you?
How did you get here today to be working on the incredible stuff
that you're working on right now?

(06:03):
I sometimes, I think I'm a little bit of a fan of
I sometimes or very often wonder how I got to where I am today.
I feel, I feel that's a really powerful question,
especially now that we've just announced FETI
and all the things that we've announced.

(06:23):
I just feel very humbled and very honored to be working with
the people I'm working with, working alongside and for some
of the investors we're working with,
and working for some of the most amazing brave people
that we're working with on a technology
which I think is really useful today.

(06:46):
And we know it's useful today and has the potential to be
a key part of the Bitcoin ecosystem going forward.
So, but as a background, I was, if I got really far back,
I was, I always say I was an Anglo-Jerian,
which is basically a way of saying,
although I was born in the UK and I'm British English,

(07:10):
I was conceived in Nigeria, Nigerian parents.
So I have these mixtures of this Nigerian Ebo,
specifically Ebo tribe culture,
which is very much about studying,
very much about hustling business.
You know, there's a very funny video on TikTok
of this five-year-old girl giving this,

(07:30):
just this adult guy, a ticking down
for messing up with her business.
Yeah.
And, you know, it's just every,
I'm sure she's probably Ebo Nigerian
because it's very classic thing.
So I had that cultural side,
but I had the British side as well around innovation

(07:52):
and thinking laterally and all this sort of stuff.
And that's where I started.
And it was that point I very early on fell in love
with computers and with AI.
And while growing up, I also had the advantage
because many people in the West
or the global South don't have this advantage

(08:13):
of being a child of both worlds.
So I'd be constantly traveling backwards and forwards
between the two.
And so you saw this sort of sliding doors,
like parallel world where people who were in the West,
how their life progressed,
people in the global South, how their life progressed,
direct cousins, direct brothers.
So it was just purely due to circumstance.

(08:34):
You could see the differences.
And it became very clear that there was a broken system.
It took a while for me to see
as they were sales more to a broken money,
but there was clearly a broken system.
And then I discovered Bitcoin.
A number of friends pointed me in its direction.
This was in 2011.
I became, because I was a card carrying geek,

(08:58):
I became really infatuated with the technology.
I thought it was the world's first merit to crass money.
Wasn't sure it would last too long.
Fast forward two years later,
and it continued to last.
My soon to be co-founder approached me to say,
why don't we create a Bitcoin exchange in the UK?
And we did.

(09:19):
It became, it went on to be the UK's longest running
Bitcoin exchange.
And we went from literally three people above a garage,
then the classic startup to a very successful company.
Had well over a billion in trade volume,
at 1.70% market share.
We were the first and only exchange
to have an unbroken record of provable solvency.

(09:41):
So proof of reserves is ingrained.
I've done the proof of work to show proof of reserves
is something that's very important to us,
which is why right from the beginning
of my interaction with Feddy Mint,
we've been looking at the ways to best do that.
But the challenge I always had was
I was based in the city of London.

(10:02):
I wasn't helping the people that I originally thought
that Bitcoin had the chance to help,
which was people everywhere,
so potential for a medium of exchange.
And eventually decided to sell and find a way
of getting people off exchanges
and getting them closer to being self-sovereign.

(10:24):
I realized this was a journey,
and after trying to get them to leap
from these fully custodial,
centralized solutions to jump
to being fully self-sovereign,
it was too big a leap for most people.
So I was looking for ways to get them
to go along and start that journey.

(10:44):
And it was in that pursuit,
I met my current co-founder, Eric Syrian.
He was the inventor of Feddy Mint.
He explained this protocol to me,
and I immediately realized this was the solution to that.
So I became Feddy Mint's biggest cheerleader.
And a year later, less than a year later, we started Feddy,

(11:08):
and this was after I'd visited Oslo
for the Oslo Freedom Forum
after the invite of Alex Gladstein.
This was just after Bitcoin Miami 2020,
and I saw and heard the stories

(11:28):
of incredible men and women from around the world
who are just the displays of bravery
were both shocking and also encouraging.
They just told you that the human spirit is indomitable.
And I decided that we have a technology,

(11:50):
Eric and I that could help.
Eric and I and Justin actually, that could help.
We had a team that could support this,
and we had a customer base that needed it now,
and we knew that in future,
many more people would need it worldwide.
But we had the solution to,

(12:11):
we believed we had the solution to the biggest challenge
for a startup.
How do you find your initial target market
that you build a base from and then you grow from there?
And we'd found that target market
and we started to fundraise.
Luckily, starting in the Oslo Freedom Forum as well,
and before, I met, and also my previous career in CoinFlow,

(12:35):
and my co-founders previous careers,
we'd met some incredible ladies and gentlemen
from the Bitcoin space who were investors
and for leaders and they chose to support us
because they shared the mission and vision.
And it's basically the rest is history.

(12:57):
Today we have a growing and incredible team,
and we're just, I can't believe they've managed to build
this sort of fever dream idea,
this nearly impossible idea of this community super app,
run by and for communities,
putting the power of an exchange or a coin base or so on,

(13:21):
but into the hands of the community.
And how does you build it in such a short period of time?
It's incredible to see having followed
the FETI journey a little bit.
And I think, before we dive in,
important to point out here, as you did,
there's FETIMENT, the protocol,

(13:41):
and then there is FETI, which is the company.
I think sometimes those are perhaps accidentally used
interchangeably, I myself have certainly been guilty
in the past, but maybe just for folks
who aren't totally familiar,
we don't have to get overly technical,
but can you explain the basic structure
of the FETIMENT protocol?

(14:03):
And then how exactly FETIMENT is building on top of that
and kind of what that vision looks like
as you guys are now in official launch week.
Okay, how FETI is building on top of FETIMENT.
Yeah, yeah.
So FETIMENT is a community custody protocol.

(14:24):
So it's, and it's a federated community custody protocol.
It allows a number of people, we call them guardians,
these trusted individuals who are elected by a community
to operate on behalf of the community
to operate the FETIMENT software.
And they're able to run any application that they choose

(14:47):
in a federated manner on behalf of a community.
Now, there is what the functions that we allow you
to run from day one, and one of the most important
is being able to access the Bitcoin blockchain.
So Bitcoin, so a federated Bitcoin
equals effectively multi-sig.
Being able to access the Lightning network,

(15:08):
but again with, so this federated access
to the Lightning network.
So the benefit there is again, no single point of trust,
but this group of, this community can access
the Lightning network by using these guardians
to support that.
And finally, the technology that gets a lot of conversation
and that started it all was federated eCash.

(15:30):
And specifically you're running federated eCash Mint,
hence the name FETIMENT.
And eCash is a protocol,
it's actually the first cryptocurrency.
It was invented in 1983 by David Chowme,
hence the name Chowme and eCash.
It allows you to issue these bearishments

(15:54):
that are backed by some other asset.
In 1983, before the internet was widespread
and before, well before Bitcoin,
the asset was money in the bank,
a bit like Tevar or so.
But now with the invention of Bitcoin,
the world's hardest money,
the world's most meritocratic money,

(16:15):
you can back eCash by Bitcoin itself.
So eCash was a scaling solution for Bitcoin
before Bitcoin existed.
Now, and even actually is quite interesting, fun fact,
even nine days after Bitcoin,
the Bitcoin white paper came out,

(16:36):
on the cryptography mailing list,
people were already suggesting that to scale Bitcoin,
you should use Chowme and eCash mints, multiple of them,
running on top of the Bitcoin blockchain,
and then you should have some sort of protocol
for settling between these mints.
That protocol for setting between the mints
was effectively describing Lightning Network

(16:58):
and these Bitcoin, these Chowme and eCash mints
running on top of Bitcoin,
effectively describing Fedement.
And it said, in so doing,
you could scale to the demands needed
if you wanted Bitcoin to be a medium of exchange.
If you want it just to be a store of value,
these are not necessary.

(17:18):
But if you want it to be a medium of exchange,
and we can get into why you will eventually want something
to be a medium of exchange,
then you need to be able to handle way more transactions
than any blockchain can handle unless you try to go to,
you know, giga make blocks,
like as they said in Bitcoin XV or some other

(17:39):
not yet proven approach.
So that's Fedement.
And then in terms of FedE, FedE creates two things,
the human side and the technological side.
On the technological side,
we create a community super app,
and that's what we've just announced.
We've been in alpha,
and then our Bravo mode is like beta.

(18:01):
Now we're finally in our final live launch.
So it's now FedE is finally ready.
And this is basically taking the best
of the freedom technology sphere.
So the best money, Bitcoin,
the best settlement and payment layer lightning,

(18:23):
the best community custody platform,
no single point of risk,
which at this point in time,
we strongly believe is Fedement.
But on top of that,
we take the best mechanism for federated communication
and chat, which based on analysis is currently matrix,
the best mechanisms for discovery

(18:44):
and decentralized identity, which is NOSTA and so on.
And we add all of these into one app,
which provides this very simple clean user experience.
And we combine all these freedom technologies into one.
On top of that, it's especially based on our experience

(19:04):
of the last nearly 18 months,
we've realized that to really roll these out
in the communities that need it the most,
you cannot just provide a technology,
you need people on the ground.
We need our own FedE order to be there on the ground
to support, to locate these communities.
And on the ground, you can imagine,
in each location that we call them FedE nights,

(19:26):
are community nights.
So they are, they locate communities.
And just like in analogous sci-fi,
they will locate communities,
they will educate those communities
and they will support those communities,
defend them and help them to make best advantage
and use of these free technologies.
They will also help them connect these freedom technologies

(19:50):
to the rest of, to the physical world.
So if they need to figure out how to take their Bitcoin
and convert it to local cash and vice versa,
they will help and suggest ways in which
they could do this.
So they will basically act like this decentralized
genius bar.
So when you take these two things together,
this decentralized community super app

(20:13):
combined that takes the best,
the current best freedom technologies and merges them
into one in this pretty incredible user experience.
And then you take this FedE order,
which is the decentralized genius bar,
that is a solution that we have,
even though it's very early,
we've been very excited about what we've seen
in terms of adoption.
And the final thing that you now know

(20:33):
from the announcement is that
even though we have built a product
which we have, we believe has the potential to be
one of the most sophisticated and advanced wallet experiences,
definitely over time, comparing favorably
with other commercial wallet offerings,

(20:56):
we have taken the decision to make the entire FedE app
completely over time, it will become completely open source,
starting with a business source license
where it's immediately as of today, source available.
And over the coming months,
it will eventually become fully AGPL open source
so that we don't just use the best freedom technologies,

(21:18):
the FedE app itself becomes a freedom technology.
I think that that's just incredible.
And there's quite a lot done packed there.
Yeah.
Starting from the back,
the open source side of things, I think,
is really incredible that you're doing that and very important.
I think it also speaks to the fact that you are confident enough

(21:40):
in your own ability as a company
to offer a really great solution that you say,
yes, we are going to continue to offer this,
we are going to still strive to be the best,
but we are also not going to be afraid of competition
because ultimately what's most important
is getting this technology, these tools
in as many people's hands as possible,
people that really need this.

(22:00):
So you're removing yourself even as a potential middleman
to that, which is, in the traditional technology world,
somewhat unheard of, you're operating under a different,
I think, set of values here, and that really speaks to that.
It's incredible.
I think that's, sorry, Karen.

(22:21):
No, go ahead, go ahead.
No, I think, well, thank you for saying that.
And by the way, this wouldn't be possible without investors
who also shared the mission and vision
and the team that understood what we're trying to do here.
There, we have finally reached a point

(22:41):
in the genus and history
of Bitcoin and the Bitcoin ecosystem
and the freedom technology ecosystem,
where there are a collection of technologies
which taken together can make an incredible experience.
We've finally reached that point.
Two or three years ago, we were being closed,

(23:04):
but not quite there.
And it is not just the technologies,
it's websites and offerings because with the FedE app,
you can add what we call FedE mods,
which it has its own built-in web browser
and you can add features and functionalities.
So we showed BitRefill there, we have BC maps,
and you could add in, for example, the Unleashed.chat

(23:27):
or whatever it may be.
There are now dozens, maybe approaching 100 sites
that offer very specific functionalities
that are actually pretty useful,
but they sort of work seamlessly with each other
because of the Lightning network and so on.
And so we finally reached this point
and so it became possible to build a system

(23:50):
that brought it all together in one place.
Then we were lucky enough to have access
to some incredible design and UX talent
and people on the ground who were able
to understand people's needs and feed that back.
And so we had this incredible loop of,
and we continue to have this loop of human-sensitive design

(24:10):
where we can take our views off the table
and listen to what people will need and want
and upgrade, have a platform,
which is what FedE mods allow to extend with functionalities.
So for example, when we started,
we started with the idea of let's just take FedE mods
and make a wallet, but then it became very clear

(24:31):
that actually the idea scanning QR codes and so on is great,
but people spend their time in these communities
in chat, sorry for the feedback that came,
let's integrate chat in.
And initially we'll see how it goes,
but when we saw someone pay for something through chat,
the magic of that experience we realized,

(24:54):
this is now, you can't go back off the scene now
because it's so intuitive to send money
while you're having a conversation with them
and then you realize trade is the combination
of communication and money.
One without the other doesn't equal trade transaction.
Another thing we realized was the need for,

(25:16):
especially when people have no disposable income
or low disposable income and fluctuations in price
could be incredibly meaningful for people at these extremes.
If it's just plain money or then you can,
or it's your long-term savings and it's a drawdown of 20%,
you can just wait, it's easy to just hodl and wait,

(25:39):
but if that's the money you need to live on for the month,
you just can't wait.
And again, it challenged us.
And so we spent, we started working on it
from the beginning of last year,
so 18 months now, quietly in the background,
we prefer proof of work and delivery.
We worked on this thing called stable balance,
which is effectively a mechanism

(26:01):
to stabilize the value of Bitcoin within the Fedement.
So then each Fedement can choose, it's up to each Federation,
can choose to add that functionality.
And if they so wish, people can hold a Bitcoin balance
or lock some or all of their Bitcoin balance to some asset,
let's say USD or so on.
Again, that was 18 months of development for that one feature,

(26:23):
but we needed to solve that problem in a way
which didn't involve any trusted intermediary.
That was one of the things that we always tried to avoid,
was no requirement like with a normal stable coin
of trusting money in a bank,
it's still all Bitcoin within the system.
And even just yesterday, over the last few days,

(26:44):
we've seen a reduction in price of Bitcoin by 20%,
but the communities that have been using stable balance
only Bitcoin in the system see their value
being locked to their local currency
and they've been protected from that volatility.
So it's great to see.
But again, all of these different things,

(27:05):
we've known, Tadstryger talked about discrete log contracts
for differences of the way to solve this on Bitcoin.
There were discussions around, we know about lightning,
we've known about Bitcoin, we've known about all these features,
but bringing it all into one app,
this is why I say the team has been incredible.
And this is why you need sort of all of this functionality

(27:28):
to be able to solve the problem.
There is the MVP for getting medium of exchange to work
is way, way, way higher than the MVP
of getting Stora Valley to work,
which is why in retrospect,
it's sort of obvious why it's taken longer
to get medium of exchange to work.

(27:49):
It's just a much higher set of things that you need
before people start using it.
And also, it's a much,
you have to make sure you focus on the people
who actually need it today,
not potentially need it tomorrow.
And focusing on them allows you to solve the problems for them today.
And when more and more people need it over time,

(28:10):
you're there, you're ready, ready.
I think that that's such an interesting point
because we see, I have not been the Bitcoin space
as long as you, even in my short time here,
what I have seen is that there is the constant debate
between Stora Valley, medium of exchange,
which is more important.

(28:32):
And obviously, we know the technical limit of the UTXO set,
for example, does not allow every person on the planet
to self-custody their Bitcoin and own a UTXO.
It's just, it's not going to happen.
Hence the layers that are built on top of Bitcoin, right?
Hence the Lightning Network.
But even the Lightning Network,
you might know the stat better than I do,

(28:55):
but the amount of blocks that would have to be filled
just with channel openings is massive, right?
So you still have these barriers
to having that full, you know, Stora Valley self-custody.
And I think that what a lot of people in the West miss,
or should I say, what a lot of us need to do,
it's that what Gladstein says to mention him again,

(29:19):
to check your financial privilege,
that for a great majority of the world,
Stora Valley, yes, that's a nice idea,
but more importantly is figuring out just a way
to actually access basic financial services,
to use money as a medium of exchange on a day-to-day basis
without getting absolutely robbed along the way

(29:40):
by various middlemen,
and doing so in a way that actually can help
to foster growth within the community,
so that down the road, because you have a stable way
to engage in trade, you can actually start to store your value,
but you need the MOE first in that case.
So can you talk a little bit about just your approach to that,

(30:02):
FETI's approach to that,
why you view that medium of exchange as such a crucial part
that some people very much go the other way and say,
well, no, this is just a pristine digital asset,
it's really not important to be used as a medium of exchange,
we'll figure that part out later in different layers,
but you guys are literally building this right now
as we speak.

(30:25):
So, I mean, there's so much there,
and I don't even know if I'll cover it,
but also I have sympathy for the view that
it's a medium of exchange now,
and we as the Bitcoin community will figure that out later,
and it's completely fine for a large set of people

(30:46):
within the community to have that viewpoint.
But there needs to be some subset to work on figuring that out,
and that is we put ourselves in a camp that we,
yes, we see Bitcoin as a store of value and we hold it,
but we've taken on the task as of many others,
and I don't really care who succeeds,

(31:08):
we think that we will give it a very, very good go,
but more importantly,
it's just simple that someone succeeds and someone has to do it.
If everybody's waiting for someone else to do it,
then it won't get done.
But the way I see it is that if you're in,
for many people who are listening to this podcast,

(31:31):
they're going to say,
it's obvious that the first thing that comes is store of value,
and if you look around,
most people are thinking about holding it,
they don't want to spend their Bitcoin,
I think you're going to be stupid to spend your Bitcoin,
I've heard everything in under the sun.
So for them, it's clearly store of value first,

(31:52):
and when I have absolutely no chance to spend anything other than,
I've got rid of all of my less performing assets,
not just my fiat, but my stocks and my property, whatever,
I've got rid of everything else,
then you're going to prize this Bitcoin out of my hands,

(32:15):
and I'll have to use it because I have no choice.
And then as that happens, at some point,
people will start switching their units of account in shops
to being Bitcoin because the price will stabilize,
and as it stabilizes,
we've moved over to Bitcoin being not just the store of value,

(32:37):
but the medium exchange, and that may happen,
and then there's a question of when that happens,
it may happen in five years, it may happen in 50,
it may happen in forever,
and we may just stay a store of value,
and that's one side.
But then you have to realize that for the vast majority of the world,

(33:01):
and that's not just the global suffering,
even in the West, in the United States, in Europe,
most people do not have any significant disposable income,
they just don't have it,
and check your financial privileges
isn't just about people thinking about the global self,

(33:25):
even in just probably somewhere within a few miles of where you live,
will have no disposable income,
and they have costs that they have to pay,
and saying, just save 50%.
Well, maybe I only eat 15 days a month,

(33:46):
or I somehow have rent for two weeks a month,
I just can't do that, I live hand to mouth,
and that's the majority of people.
So if you live hand to mouth, that basically means
you have no disposable income,
you have nothing that you can save with,
therefore logically,
store of value is going to be the lowest priority for you,

(34:07):
because you're going to think about it,
but in your given month,
you're going to desire having lots of savings,
but you don't have them,
there's just the reality of you all living in reality,
so you cannot start holding value,
starting to hold it for the long term,
starting to speculate,
do DeFi, invest in NFTs,
and get further and further,

(34:29):
and the more extreme these gets,
the more it's correlated to just how financially privileged you are,
if you're willing to spend your money on these more esoteric things,
which is not a problem, it's just the world you live in,
and if you have that luxury, good on you,
but for the majority of people in the world,
they store of value will be the lowest priority,
just by default, because they won't have it.
So then it comes on to medium of exchange,

(34:52):
and again, a very large percentage of people in the world
will still be using cash to buy things,
and they will be unbanked or underbanked,
it's either very, very basic banking,
or incredibly, almost criminally expensive banking,
or debanked, they live under the Yokovo Foratera regimes,

(35:14):
and there's great banking there,
but they risk their life and liberty by using that banking,
so they're excluded from the banking system for one of those free reasons.
So what it means is that when they do want to transact,
their transactions will just take up a lot more of their bandwidth.
Again, if you're in the West, and you're buying a cup of coffee,

(35:38):
you're probably going to take your card,
or you're going to take your mobile phone these days,
and just tap to pay.
And so the interaction when you actually spend,
let's say you buy the same amount of things as someone else buys
in these other parts of the world,
but the interaction is a fraction of a second,
versus these others, they have to take out the cash from their pockets,

(36:01):
oh, they left it at home, they have to walk home,
buy, they get the cash, bring it back,
they have to physically money change,
they receive money in cash, in one currency,
they might have to go to a money changer.
That could be a whole day event to change money.
It's not just automatically when you make a payment.
So the amount of time they live in the world of medium of exchange
is way higher as well compared to someone who has disposable income in the West.

(36:27):
And then finally there's a unit of accounts.
When you're at that stage, you're constantly economising,
can I afford one egg or two?
You're thinking about prices way more.
Whereas if you're awesome in the West and they say,
yeah, I bought a cup of coffee,
you bought four or five cups of coffee over the last month,
how much did you pay for them?

(36:48):
About five bucks, how much exactly did you pay for them?
I don't know.
It's just you're not even thinking about the unit of account or price.
Because if it was 50 bucks, you'll then pay attention to the actual price.
But if it's three bucks or four,
you literally don't even think about the account.
Because as long as the number of zeros, the number of digits is enough,

(37:09):
it's sort of okay for you.
Whereas on the other side, because you're seeing people with monthly salaries of $10,
you're thinking about the unit of account the most.
So it's a long way of saying that for the world's poorest,
it's an exact opposite experience of money.
Unit of account is most.

(37:31):
Second is medium of exchange.
And least, because you have no savings, is store of value.
Whereas as soon as you start developing a store of value,
it starts to flip.
And then it flips and you immediately start realising,
well, if I can store value and I can hold it in a really strong, hard money,
then I can build and build and build.

(37:52):
And then your attention slips.
So it's a bit like a magnet where it'll either flip to one side or another.
And so because in the West, you're surrounded by other people
who are in your affinity group and they tend to also have stores of value,
then your bubble, and it's the same,
it will tell you that it's clearly store of value.

(38:13):
And it'll be very hard.
There's various orders of thinking,
first order, second order, third order of thinking.
And if you're at sort of second or third order of thinking,
you'll realise that I have a view and the people around me have a view
and they have a context.
But at higher levels of thinking, you'll realise,
but there are other people who live in a different context
and may have a different perception of the world.

(38:36):
And that's where you get to fourth or fifth.
There's nine orders of thinking.
Some get really hard.
Very few people can do ninth order thinking icon
because it starts to become incredibly abstract.
But still understanding, this is one of the challenges.
I don't want to get political, but lots of times you see this us versus them.
And the understanding is, but the higher order of thinking is like,

(38:58):
they have a different viewpoint and in their viewpoint,
their positions make sense in their context,
based on their life experiences.
And understanding the fact that different people have different contexts
that make sense and then understanding that they have different senses
in different locations.
In one location, that might make sense.
In a different location, transported, it won't make sense and so on.

(39:21):
But the more we can understand those differences,
the more you can lead to insights which can help us solve problems
that we have in adoption of Bitcoin and beyond.
But in the case of adoption of Bitcoin, it gave us the insight that today,
right now, we want to focus on people.

(39:42):
We want to go where Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, Venmo, Apple Pay, Google Pay,
don't go to begin with, where those don't exist.
Because if they already exist and many people are using them there,
then the best we can hope to do is to become, in most cases,
to become as good or maybe a bit better.

(40:04):
People don't switch when you're a little bit better.
They switch when you're 5, 10, 20 times better.
Well, if you have zero options or zero good options,
well, then Bitcoin is infinitely better than zero options.
And that's where you start seeing transaction.
That's where people start giving you feedback saying,
I really like this, but I need this and I need that.

(40:26):
That's a sign, the indicator that this is the place to,
where we're first going to crack medium of exchange.
I love that.
And I think it's such an interesting way to look at it that really,
as you said, it flips it on its head from the traditional Western narrative of,
you have to have store value first, right?
And while it is, I think you would agree as well that it is important

(40:47):
that we have a solid foundation for all of this to work,
as in Bitcoin at the base layer needs to be sound.
But when people are thinking about,
okay, I'm living hand to mouth and I thought the really important point
you brought up was the amount of time that needs to be spent,
not doing something that is productive,
not doing something that's making the money,
but just figuring out how they're going to be able to actually use the money

(41:10):
that they have, the small amount, to acquire the goods or services that they need.
And that's such an inordinate amount of time for people
that don't have access to basic financial services,
where they can't just have to pay.
Giving them the tools to have a medium of exchange
and especially in a community setting that makes it really convenient.
That's what enables them to in the future

(41:31):
actually be able to engage in more productive commerce
and then to be able to build up a store of value for themselves.
But they need to get over those barriers first.
And maybe we could dig into a little bit just the...
A huge part of what you guys focus on is the community aspect of this.
That's the whole idea of having these guardians of the Federation

(41:52):
within these communities.
Can you talk a little bit about that
and kind of why this model and why FediMint
and then everything that Fedi is building on top of that,
including chat, including all these other applications
that can also be leveraged by that community
and the eCash itself, which is again a bearer instrument for anyone listening.

(42:13):
It is not a shit coin.
This is a bearer instrument on top of Bitcoin.
Can you talk about why that's so important for communities
and also why these communities, why it works in those settings so much better
and why it makes sense?
And one thing just before I go on to that,

(42:34):
just something that you said, I just want to clarify,
because we said the West and the Global South,
but it's actually not that it's more the people who have access to disposable income.
Let's just say they're privileged enough and you might not feel yourself being that privileged,
but even if you can save $50 a month,

(42:56):
you have access to disposable income of some sort that you can keep for the long term
versus people who don't.
And so you could be in the United States
and not have access to disposable income.
Or conversely, you could be in the Global South
and there's still an upper class and a middle class there
and they have access to disposable income.

(43:18):
And for those people, they live in their own bubble in the Global South
and they're using DeFi and NFTs and so on.
So sometimes we see usage in these
and they tend to have access to the more access to the internet,
more access to higher education levels,

(43:41):
they are more access to Western media and are able to converse it with that world more easily.
So when we do in the West, interact with people, say in the Global South,
we're tending to be interacting just for common sense reasons
with the upper echelon, the people who have disposable income.

(44:04):
And so they will say, well, we have the same view as you, it's about story value,
because they're in their own bubble.
There's a bubble of people who live in the world of medium of exchange in each country
and there's a bubble of people who live in the world of story value.
In the West, the story value bubble is way bigger than the media exchange bubble.

(44:26):
In the Global South, the medium of exchange bubble is way bigger than the story value bubble.
But the story value bubbles in the West and the Global South
are way more likely to interact with each other than the medium of exchange bubble.
The only time that interacts is maybe when families in the diaspora are sending money home to relatives.
And so they tend to have an inkling.
But if you're just interacting on a level and forming friendships and then in your part of the same online groups,

(44:52):
you're going like, well, ten birds with a pepper will flock together.
So that also can explain why a lot of people don't come to this conclusion and they say,
well, it's actually the same.
People are only using stablecoins and so on of Teva or Circle or so on.
And yes, they are, but when you actually look at the people who are using it,
they are the wealthiest set who are using it for trading and so on.

(45:15):
But the people on the ground are not using...
Using USD in many of these countries is alien as using Bitcoin.
They live in their local currency.
Even if it's incredibly high inflating, that's still the currency that's money for them.
Even getting onto USD will be considered a luxury.
And you'll still have to have disposable income to hold USD, which you don't have.

(45:37):
So it might as well be an elephant money.
If you're one of the people who is comfortable holding your own keys,
then you need to use the best possible open source hardware.
So head to the show notes or go directly to bitbox.swiss.com
and use the promo code WALKER for 5% off the fully open source, Bitcoin-only, Bitbox O2 hardware wallet.

(46:00):
Then get your Bitcoin off the exchange and into your own self-custody.
You may have seen people talking about the dark, skippy attack on X,
which is a way for a malicious signing device to leak your private keys.
Very scary, but luckily Bitbox is one of the only two wallets to actually address this vulnerability,
so you're in luck.

(46:21):
Plus, the Bitbox O2 is easy as heck to use, whether you are brand new to Bitcoin
or you are a seasoned psychopath.
Again, it is Bitcoin-only, and again, it is fully open source.
You can head to their GitHub and verify that for yourself.
There is no need to trust me or to trust Bitbox.
And when you go to bitbox.swiss.com and use the promo code WALKER,

(46:44):
not only do you get 5% off the Bitbox O2 or any of their other products,
but you also help support this podcast.
So thank you.
Okay, so back to community.
So this is something that was a fundamental part of how Fediment works to begin with.
And it was initially, I would try to say that this was this incredible insight,

(47:10):
but it was actually initially a fundamental aspect of Fediment,
it gained its power by removing any single point of trust,
and that's how it was a fundamental improvement on the original E-Cache protocol.
The E-Cache protocol was a very simple protocol, provided privacy,
it allowed scaling, it was a bearer token, so it said it preceded the internet,

(47:33):
so you could use it rather than internet connection,
but it had a fater flaw, it required trust in one single party.
And what Eric spent many years before I even met him, and more so since then,
working on was how he could remove that single point of trust,
and so he got it from trusting one party to trusting a multitude of parties using the idea of a federation.

(47:57):
This thing was popularized by Blockstream for Liquid,
which is why actually, Blockstream were one of the first,
I think they were the first company to see Fediment and started sponsoring the project well before I'd even met Eric,
because I could see that this was an interesting use case of the federation concept.

(48:20):
But it necessitated choosing of a group of people to operate the federation,
and so you're thinking, well, how could you get that trust even lower?
Well, this is where a learning from my time at CoinFlow came into force.
We were one of the few Bitcoin-only exchanges, and we tried very hard to get our customers to self-custody.

(48:46):
We weren't just playing lip service to self-custody,
so you're self-custody, you're actually trying to get as many people to custody as possible.
We really, really wanted to try and get people to self-custody,
and we would talk to people, we would educate them about it, and offer help.
And one conversation really struck me when, now a friend, a street-wise British woman,

(49:11):
at one point after me trying for a little over a year to get it to self-custody,
she said, oh, I get Bitcoin, I want to hold it, I get the idea and the need to self-custody,
but the reality is I trust you more than I trust myself.
And that was something that got me thinking, and it got me, and then she got me shocked, and then it got me thinking.

(49:34):
And then I came back to her, and I asked, okay, who do you trust more than me?
I get it that you trust me more than yourself, but you do trust more than me.
Because, well, given, she thought about it for a very brief second, she said, well, basically,
I decided to go with you by asking my son.
And if he'd said I should join Wibblewobble exchange, I would have just trusted him.

(50:02):
So implicitly, I trust my friends and family more than I trust you.
And I realized that if you want to get people off exchanges, you have to get them to go to a party that,
at least on subset of them, trusts more than exchanges.
You can't, for the majority, a few people trust themselves more than exchanges.

(50:23):
But the vast majority of people don't.
But of that vast majority, a large percentage of them will trust implicitly their friends and family more than they trust exchanges.
And that was the nub.
It also is interesting that even the people who say they trust themselves more than exchanges will likely hold their money in a hardware wallet,

(50:46):
or more than a centralized custodian, and then they'll have the 12-word backup, and they'll hold that often,
if they're wealthy enough, in a bank vault, which means you're effectively, again, trusting a centralized custodian with your money,
because your backup is also your money, and another regulated financial institution is being trusted with your money,

(51:07):
or they would hold it with friends and family.
So by definition, they are trusting their friends and family with their money.
It's just that, mentally, people don't think of their 12-word backups as their money,
but it literally is your money, in read-only form, but it's your money.
But so with that understanding, and combined with the nature of Fediumen,

(51:31):
we felt, okay, given that people trust their community, their family, friends in their community more than exchanges,
and we wanted to find a viable alternative to exchanges,
and given that Fediumen allows this concept, why don't we focus on community?
And that was the initial idea.

(51:52):
But then we started going, but that was an idea, and it was interesting.
We talked about it at Bitcoin Miami, and after we talked about it there, Alex Glasdine came up to me,
and his eyes were alight as Alex Glasdine can be, and he said,
this is something that you have to talk about at Oslo Freedom Forum, which was only a few months later.

(52:16):
And so I agreed, I went, I talked there, and I listened to the stories, and that's when the light bulb hit me.
This wasn't just a theory, it wasn't just something that sounded like a good idea,
but what I saw and heard and experienced before me were the most incredible examples of the ultimate sort of prototype exemplars of guardians.

(52:42):
People who literally risked their life, they committed themselves to supporting these communities.
They value social capital over financial capital, and it's not everybody, but it doesn't need to be everybody.
A community could be of four or seven or ten people could support 20, 50, 10,000, 500,000 people.

(53:12):
So it only needs to be one in a hundred, one in a thousand for this to work.
And my gut experience and my view is it's way higher than one in a hundred people who care about their community and their friends and family.
And again, this is often a misunderstanding that people think that it needs everybody, or I'm not willing to do it,

(53:36):
so therefore no one's willing to do it.
Again, this is different order thinking that that might be, and it's completely valid for each individual to have their view,
but not everybody thinks the same way, not everybody has the same experience, and that's sort of the higher order thinking that.
We all need to have to just to gain deeper insights and progress society forward.

(53:58):
The other thing that was even further back in my past was I, again, because I'm very privileged, I'm lucky,
although I had very humble upbringing, I was lucky to do very well at work,
and I had the opportunity and a few times instead to go on safari.
And on safari, this was a bucket list item, on safari I observed a number of things,

(54:26):
but what I observed is that there are people or animals that have natural advantages over others,
but if animals that have less advantages group together and form societies, form communities,
they are able to successfully defend and increase their chances and increase their chances of survival and surviving and thriving,

(54:51):
as opposed to if they were separate.
And that was, again, a big insight for me, and we see this in humankind.
Our ability to form community is the technology, and it seems weird to people,
because when you say technology, you're thinking of the hammer or a computer or so on,
but for me, a technology is something extrinsic to a person that helps improve their lives

(55:19):
or makes things easier or allows them to achieve more, i.e. it's not part of you.
So your brain is not a technology because it's part of you.
Your hands ability to manipulate the world is not a technology because it's part of you,
but community, the concept, the invention of community, complex community with hierarchies and different roles and specializations.
This is a very unique technology that very few animals or species share.

(55:45):
Humans do, termites do, and bees do, and termites create these termite mounds that are as high as buildings
that can control temperature within a degree without any power that can withstand wind, rain,
even an elephant standing on them and still maintain this perfect temperature to be able to sustain the food,

(56:06):
that is the food of the termites, and even today, we still don't fully understand how they actually work,
but termites don't have even what we would call even a brain, they have a few nerve cells,
they don't have opposable farms and fingers, they manipulate the entire world with their mouths.
So in those two other degrees which we say are human superpowers, they're as low as you can get,

(56:29):
but they're similar to us in their ability to form complex society, and that one technology,
literally they're one technology, they have no other technologies, allows them to create structures that we can't even fathom.
And so that, for me, was another insight to say technology is a superpower,
and Fediumint now uses that fundamental human technology and combines it where we now get to this point

(56:53):
where there's these freedom technologies like Bitcoin, like Lightning, like Fediumint, like Nostra, like Matrix,
and in future, as others become mature and needed, then we will add those as well,
but only when they're mature because we're dealing with now real use cases where if you lose $5, it's half of your monthly income,

(57:14):
so I was having, again, I'm segueing here, but I was at Nashville, and I think it was about an hour after the Trump speech on May stage,
and we were talking about scaling solutions. They were saying scaling in layers.
I prefer not to talk about Fediumint as a layered scaling solution.
I think it's a scaling solution for Bitcoin, but it's much more than that, and it's very different from that.

(57:41):
It scales custody, which many of these don't do, and it scales privacy, which many of these don't do,
it scales transactions, which many of these don't do, and it scales expressivity as well in adding functionality,
which is a focus of a loss of these. So that's why I say it's just a scaling solution.

(58:05):
But while there, a few days before, I was discussing with some people the talk, and someone made the comment that Bitcoin and S&M exchange,
or these systems, they're all basically just at the stage where they're just used for play and experimentation,

(58:28):
so it doesn't matter if people lose a bit of money here or there, or it could be reckless.
And I commented that actually some people are using it for their, effectively, their life savings,
and I was sort of, I was met with just complete disbelief and just laughed how ridiculous the concept that people would be using these sort of layer 2s.

(58:56):
And that's because their life experience, life savings must equal, for them, I don't know the amounts, I can't say,
but it's going to be a large amount, 10,000, 50,000, the million, I don't know, that's life savings to them.
But for our customers, life savings could be $10, because it is, every money they earn is instantly their life savings,

(59:18):
because they don't have savings beyond hand to mouth. So actually, it is true in our case.
And so the loss, and the loss of 10% to 20%, it might be a dollar or two dollars,
but the significance to that person is 20% of my life savings are getting lost.

(59:39):
Again, the good thing is we're very well resourced as a company,
and for the target customers that we, anybody can use the product, but for the markets that we focus on,
we're always, they have a challenge or a need, we always work really hard to avoid there being a need,
and we take it as seriously as, say, another organization that deals with super high networks in the West takes it,

(01:00:04):
but we're talking about smaller amounts, and we're going to continue having that passion and focus,
and it leads us to really think carefully about the technologies that we integrate,
even though we think it's a really cool technology, and we're big fans of other things happening in the space,
and until it's reliable enough and secure enough that it could rely,
be used by these people for their life savings, we're not going to use it, we're not going to use it now,

(01:00:30):
but it doesn't mean that we won't in future. But yes, that community is a superpower,
and we see it in, I can give you some of the examples for example of some of the communities
that we've already been quietly showing proof of work and learning from in the background if you're interested.
That was exactly where I was going to go, so yeah, that sounds great.

(01:00:51):
We're psyched.
Yeah.
So yeah, well, there are many, but I can give a few.
So there's one of the earliest, and these are sort of pioneers, because they got the software when it was in,
and much earlier for, right now, we're very proud of what we've done, but there's still going to be bugs.

(01:01:16):
Like Windows 1.0 or the iPhone 1.0 is going to have bugs or issues, and we're going to work on it and so on.
But they got a version that was in beta or brava form or even alpha form, where things were just put together,
you know, as very early, but their need was strong enough, and that's a good sign that they were willing to work with us

(01:01:39):
and experiment and give feedback on something that was just way less advanced than we are today.
So one example was Queso, the Queso project.
So they are in, or they are all around sub-Saharan Africa, mainly in West Sub-Saharan Africa,
and they work with farming corporatives in that region.

(01:02:04):
And so what they do is we did an experiment where we worked with 60 farms and 60 farmers in free farming corporatives,
and they had the challenge that many of these people are at this point where they don't have banking, they live in very rural areas,
they actually don't have banking, they don't have access to be able to get, definitely not to get credit and or to be able to organize to fund,

(01:02:37):
to get sort of quantity discounts on their purchasing.
And so two big things they need are pesticide and fertilizer, pesticide to kill pests that can damage their crops,
and fertilizers to increase their yield.
As a result, they use far less pesticide and fertilizer than comparable farms in the West,

(01:03:01):
and therefore their yields are significantly less for the same amount of land.
In fact, their land should be way more fertile because in sub-Saharan Africa, it's naturally fertile part of the world,
but it's way less fertile because of that.
So they were able to use the FERDI system to do a few things.
They were able to receive funds in the farming corporatives would form a federation,

(01:03:27):
and they were able to receive funds and therefore provide a form of banking for these communities when they didn't have digital banking.
So if they wanted to pay for something, they would have to walk into town to get it, which could take several hours to do.
Instead, they can now pay directly from where they were and purchase things, saving them a lot of time,

(01:03:50):
which could be then utilized in farming as opposed to walking.
We also, I mentioned a stable balance functionality that was able to take Bitcoin and lock it into a certain price.
They were able to stabilize the value of Bitcoin.
Once we'd implemented that, because we were implementing it, they were one of the earliest projects that we worked with.
But the feedback was the volatility was a challenge.

(01:04:13):
So we worked on this and they were able to stabilize that protected them from volatility,
but still remaining backed by and in Bitcoin.
So that was able to stabilize again, made it more effectively more of this bank like experience for them.
They were also able to coordinate within because of the fact that integrated chat within this community, they were able to coordinate.

(01:04:36):
We have FEDDiMods one is called Multi-Spend, which is effectively like community savings pot.
So they were able to receive the items as a community.
People could discuss and debate in chat how they wish to use the money in this forum again,
not having to save the time to travel backwards and forwards.
Because in these sort of rural villages, houses are not like next door to each other.

(01:04:57):
They could be few, three or four kilometers apart in some cases.
I spread out a very wide range because these are farms.
If I want to have a conversation, I have to walk together and meet and you said I can have the conversation here.
And once it was decided, you could use the same mechanism, one tool to be able to disseminate the money for a certain purpose.
It also then once the agreement on how the expenditure would happen, they would work with fertilizers and pesticides suppliers

(01:05:24):
who are willing to accept Bitcoin for fertilizers and fertilizers.
And those and those personalized and fertilized suppliers, our FEDDiMods was able to work with them to find people who would be very happy locally,
who tended to be more affluent, more educated, who would like to acquire more Bitcoin and were willing to give them local currency,

(01:05:51):
because they would tend to live or have transport to be able to easily get into town and interact with people who are of a higher financial standing,
who would therefore be more willing to accept Bitcoin locally for local currency.
So all of that systems, you could have in theory done, but you would have had to, it would have taken a lot longer.

(01:06:14):
It would have been a lot more expensive to do.
You would have had to lock in value to local currency and cash, you have to be transporting this cash around.
What now could take a matter of hours in a conversation could have taken a day or two to organize,
and it would have been a lot of slippage as well because of inflation and many other reasons.

(01:06:35):
And it would have required multiple tools.
Instead, you had one tool, and again, this is where the human element came in, that could train people how to best utilize it
and educate and give advice on how to solve the very important location of what we call falls, trusted human off-ramps,
another form of legendary night, which is a key part.

(01:06:59):
This is a very interesting segue, and I'll give you another example.
Again, if you are someone who has disposable income and is able to save,
and you're thinking about store of value first and your normal lived experience,
you think about Univ. account very infrequently,

(01:07:20):
when it comes to conversion from Bitcoin to Fiat, the general view is going from Fiat to Bitcoin,
because you want to acquire more Bitcoin.
But if you live hand to mouth, then you generally are receiving Bitcoin,
and when you're thinking of conversion, your first view is conversion from Bitcoin to Fiat.

(01:07:41):
You want to get cash and start using it locally.
So again, it's literally, if you have disposable income, your worldview is one way, it's North Pole,
and if you have no disposable income, it flips, and it's the exact opposite way of richly thinking,
which is why it's so difficult for people who have disposable income to gain an intuition for how someone

(01:08:04):
who wants to use it as a medium exchange will think and the problems they will have,
because their perspective in worldview is the exact opposite of what it needs to be to intuit that.
So that's one example.
Now, across Africa, that's 60 farms, but across Africa, there are millions of farmers

(01:08:25):
employing tens, hundreds of millions of people.
I think we're looking at a number of 400 million people are employed across Africa, so the potential is huge.
So that's one example.
And given that example, we just announced a not deal, an agreement with Save the Children,

(01:08:50):
and Save the Children, and Deliver Zeto, over 100 million children, unfortunately, year-wide, and their families,
their objective is to bring that down to zero.
And that's the aim for many of these organizations.
All of these human rights defenders and NGOs and humanitarian organizations would want to and desire to become obsolete,

(01:09:17):
of course, but unfortunately, right now, these are the numbers across the world.
And they deliver over 150 million, is deployed, or cash voucher assistance.
Again, what they were seeing is that you can have incredible losses of capital,

(01:09:41):
because they have to basically get cash to people.
It can be slow.
And they have this greater realization that from their head offices trying to send money to these people,
they're very distant and remote from the actual problems on the ground.

(01:10:02):
So what they are seeing, and we're starting to notice more and more organizations coming to this conclusion,
is that it makes sense to find trusted members of the community who are part of the community and send them capital in one go,
but give them mechanisms and some autonomy to make decisions on how that capital should be spent,

(01:10:23):
and then be able to report back on that to Save the Children in line with their reporting requirements.
This is a number of benefits.
One, it's more efficient.
Instead of having to individually send different transactions, they can send one in bulk, saving them a lot of time and resources,

(01:10:44):
which means more money going towards aid.
The other thing is, it's an understanding that people who are local will not only react more quickly,
but they will likely react more appropriately, and it gives them flexibility.
It might be that you give everybody a different amount of capital or cash voucher assistance.
It might be that it makes sense to use some of the capital towards a community project, which is needed.

(01:11:10):
That community project could be a clear and present need for the community right now, for aid,
or it could be a preventative need.
For example, if you're in a region which knows that you consistently have floods,
you could use some of the capital to work on building dams as a preventative medium,
so that when a flood will almost certainly happen again, the damage is less severe, needing less aid.

(01:11:37):
Again, trying to go from afar, not knowing the local context and being able to come to these conclusions,
is often less effective than having people who are on the ground who have an incentive to think about the best and most appropriate way to deal with that.
So, again, the potential for all of these projects is very, very large,

(01:12:00):
and the hope is that this can reduce costs, save time, and therefore lead to more human flourishing.
One final example, which I can say now we've learned so much from, is an organisation called Refunite Refugees United.

(01:12:21):
What they ostensibly did or do is unite refugees with their families.
They could have been displaced because of floods, because of war, and so on.
And they do this for, again, millions of people around the world, unfortunately.
One thing that they also do is provide, again, it's a very similar example,

(01:12:46):
but they were one of the earliest to provide cash voucher assistance.
Before we even met them, the team started realising that the process of delivering cash voucher assistance was very inefficient when you're doing it individually,
and so they experimented with the idea of finding community leaders and giving them aid, and then working with them to report back.

(01:13:16):
They then realised that this worked incredibly effectively.
They've been doing this for many, many years.
The problem is they didn't have the resources and technology team to build an offering, so they have a hodgepodge of different solutions,
some in the messenger, some wallets, they were already using Bitcoin wallets, and some other sort of reporting tools,

(01:13:43):
and they had to train these people on all these collection of different tools that were strung together.
They also didn't have solutions for stabilising the value, so they were at the whim of volatility of Bitcoin and so on.
And these tools weren't really optimised necessarily for these environments as well.

(01:14:06):
So, for example, you have no internet, you cannot send Bitcoin, whereas eCash, because they're bare instruments,
you can actually send it without an internet connection for short periods of time.
You could be without internet and still utilise it because it's a bare instrument.
If I can show an animated QR code through my screen, someone can scan that and receive the eCash, for example.

(01:14:27):
So, along we came and we were introduced to them, initially in Uganda,
like we were working with a number of refugee camps in Uganda, and we were explaining what we were wanting to do
and create this community super app and we thought it might be of interest to them, and there I sort of lit up,

(01:14:49):
because they're basically saying, we are the sort of ying and yang of each other.
On one hand, we have this technology that we're working on, and we have a strong hypothesis by this point,
from our experience as a key sore and so on, that this will be useful for communities,
and the community context is a superpower.

(01:15:11):
And then you have this other organisation who has realised communities are super power,
and it's a piece of uncommon knowledge, and it's been used to great effect to allow them to support
significantly more communities, way more effectively, and they have the data to show,
to show, to prove that at least way better outcomes, but what they didn't have is the technology that could bring it all together.

(01:15:34):
And so, that was a marriage made in heaven.
And as I said, and so we managed to get a lot of feedback from them on the early version,
because they'd already done it, they already knew what was needed for the product,
and we'd already had planned or were doing 70 to 80%,
but it helped actually to refine the product even further, and it really helped us realise that there's something powerful here.

(01:16:01):
And ever since then, we are seeing more and more organisations coming along and saying,
the idea of leveraging the community is a powerful unlock.
And as I said, communities aren't, this is in extreme circumstances, but community is an unlock everywhere.

(01:16:22):
We just have to look in the Bitcoin ecosystem, just to look at Nashville when we were singing karaoke,
look at Bitcoin Park, and look at the space,
look at all of these other communities that are around the world, Bitcoin jungle, everywhere.
These wouldn't have worked if we were all just completely trustless and we didn't have community.

(01:16:46):
And so you just look around yourself and realise Bitcoin as an ecosystem, as a community, is constantly attacked.
And again, if we weren't a strong community, we wouldn't have been able to survive all the attacks we received.
Community is a superpower. We utilise it every day.
We're just taking that superpower and supercharging it with freedom technologies.

(01:17:10):
I love that. And I think it's such an inspiring thing because at the end of the day, you're providing a solution
that actually allows, it's a high-tech solution that allows people to actually go back and thrive in a local environment.
So much now we see these top-down approaches to everything, right? Top-down approaches to governance, top-down approaches to money.

(01:17:36):
This is something that to me is so aligned with that Bitcoin ethos of decentralisation, not as a buzzword,
but in its truest sense, getting back to small local communities where you do have high-trust environments.
You have high-trust because that's your family, those are your closest friends that you've known forever.
It's a different model that allows for so much more.

(01:18:00):
And that's the kind of place you want to live in, right?
You don't want to live in a society in a community where nobody trusts each other.
Then it's not a community. That's the whole point of community, of family in general, is to have that trust.
And I want to be conscious of your time because I know it's late for you and it's a big week,
but one thing if you have a couple more minutes that I would like to pick into is you talked about dissidents, right,

(01:18:25):
and these human rights activists, and you've talked about several organizations that are already utilising FETI, right,
that are already benefiting from this.
It seems to me that this is something also that, back to the Oslo Freedom Forum and that incredible group of people that you were talking with,
that this is something that is not just about giving the community a better tool for transacting internally,

(01:18:51):
but this is something that allows for private transactions, that allows for private communications.
I mean, if I'm understanding correctly, it creates a bit of a black box of information where,
if you're within that trusted circle, you are privy to it, but authoritarian regimes, dictators, they are not,

(01:19:13):
and they also can't cut you off from access to that system. They can't touch the system. They can't spy on the system.
Can you talk a little bit about that, because it seems to me that once, and especially since you're open sourcing this,
what you guys have built, this is something that once it gets out of the bottle, it becomes somewhat unstoppable

(01:19:38):
and not just a tool for more effective commerce in a local setting, but for dissident communities living under authoritarian regimes everywhere.
It seems like a necessary and private compliment to Bitcoin that gives you that near perfect privacy of an e-cash mint,

(01:19:59):
but also gives you that medium of exchange to be able to actually still engage in commerce,
even if you are blacklisted from a bank account, even if you are censored on social media.
You still have a way to talk, to connect the fact that you're building, you have the Noster integration as well.
That gives you still a social connection too. So can you talk about that a little bit, kind of that step back to say,

(01:20:23):
once this genie is out of the bottle, is there any way for governments to put it back in?
And are there any risks there, or how do you see that evolving as a tool for not just again commerce at a local level,
which is amazing, but for escaping the punishing boot of authoritarianism, which is rampant in this world?

(01:20:44):
So, yeah, I'm happy to talk about that. I wanted to go back on the previous point as well around the community.
And just the realization that community and trust, actually, that was a specific point, that trust doesn't scale.

(01:21:06):
And that's a feature, not a bug. Because if you have a system that's truly trustless, then it does scale.
And you'll end up with a global system. We have that with Bitcoin, which is great.
For the base money, you want that. But if you have a scaling layer on top, which there's a perception that it's trustless,

(01:21:31):
which is not necessarily true, because every layer above there is some level of trust. It's a spectrum.
But it's a long conversation to get into why that's the case. And there's a lot of misunderstandings about how trustless they are.
But no layer two is fully trustless. It's just not the case. But there's a spectrum. Some are more trustless than others.

(01:21:53):
But if there is a perception that it's trust requires very little trust, for example, like a Coinbase or so on, or a Binance,
then as time goes by, more and more people will end up using that. And it becomes very, very centralized.
And if it's very centralized, that becomes its own risk.

(01:22:16):
Even if it's private or privacy preserving or privacy honoring, it will still be a risk.
Because if everybody in the world is using one system that scales Bitcoin and someone then comes along and forces it to be turned off,
then you have a bad day for a lot of people. People are going to lose money on mass,

(01:22:43):
or it could be that people may not have, even if they have a way of going on chain, first of all,
you're potentially talking about hundreds of millions of people going on chain at the same time, which would mean that it becoming incredibly expensive,
which would mean that anybody above or below a certain wealth level won't be able to afford to do it.
Or they'll have to wait several months, if not years, to be able to go on chain.

(01:23:05):
And so it means that you could be losing access to your money for a significant period of time.
Again, if you are someone who has disposable income and all you're holding there is your disposable income,
but you still have the salary to cover your living costs, you may be up to wait.
The people who lost their money on Mt. Gox waited a decade. You may be able to wait.

(01:23:27):
But if you're living hand to mouth, and this is your life savings, and you are to lose these,
then the effect will be devastating, even if you were to get it at some point.
You just can't afford to wait. At that point, it's not helpful for you.
So the fact that you need to trust federations means that, and we'll see this in the fall of the time,

(01:23:54):
but we're already starting to see signs of this, is that people will above a certain size feel the needs to create their own more local federations.
So it's a bit like this natural phenomenon where you see something grow and then it splits like cells.
They grow and then split and they grow and split.
And eventually you have this, you have millions of cells starting with one or two or three.

(01:24:16):
And people access and use multiple federations. They might use ones that are more public and larger,
but for very, very small amounts, they will store one day's worth of money on it,
or maybe even one hour's worth of money, because the larger federations will have more liquidity.
Many other people will be on the federations so they can use that, but then they will store medium amounts on closer federations,

(01:24:40):
their school federation or their work federation or their friends group.
And then finally, larger amounts with their most trusted group, family or very close friends, et cetera.
So the protocol, the hope is because of the fact there's a requirement of trust, it naturally decentralizes.
So we end up with a world with not one or two scaling layers, but instead a scaling solution where there are 10,000, 100,000,

(01:25:10):
I would love to see millions of federations of different sizes, from family-sized federations to community,
to a very few larger public federations. And it may be even in time that those public federations go,
so there are a plethora of different public federations for different communities,
and everybody's using different ones to be able to transact.

(01:25:32):
So that's just an interesting thing about trust, that actually it's a feature, not a bug.
It not only enables certain functionality, but it also acts like this counter force to the natural centralizing force,
the desire to centralize, which is natural, the human nature, the fact that you acquire trust,
prevents that hopefully going too far, and it tends to split.

(01:25:57):
In terms of privacy, this is again, as I said, one of the big reasons why I originally decided to work with my co-founder to set up FedE.
At some point in the future, as I say now that the code is open source,
we know that open source is a very powerful concept.

(01:26:20):
If something were to happen to FedE as an organization, the code now is there, it's public, it's out there.
It's also very important for these groups where, although they trust themselves and we've built up a rapport with those communities,
it's important for us, for them to not, for no one to have to trust us explicitly as well, which is why we,

(01:26:48):
it was essential for us to make the code open source, to begin with source available and eventually open source.
But yes, open source is an incredibly powerful approach to making a technology bulletproof.
And the fact that we, and hopefully in future, more and more open source engineers,

(01:27:15):
will work on making FedE and FedE Mint and Matrix and Lightning and Bitcoin, because it's not just one technology,
more and more censorship resistant, more and more easily decentralizable,
and also you provide tools to allow people to understand and observe how these tools have been operating.

(01:27:37):
In fact, just yesterday, there was a new, just been launched, there's something called FedE Mint Observer.
It's a bit like a blockchain explorer, it's observer.fedement.org, but eventually you'll be able to access the code for that as well.
But you can now see some of the public federations and in time anybody can attach.

(01:28:04):
And it gives you anybody the ability to view the federations, how they're doing, transactions, they're handling, etc.
For any federation that chooses to be public, if you choose to be private,
then there's no way to even know the federation exists.
But if you choose to be public, then people can see, have full visibility.

(01:28:26):
The beauty of the eCache protocol is such, this is specific on the eCache side,
that even if you provide full transparency on every single eCache note,
because it's cryptographically nearly perfectly private, it doesn't reveal any information in terms of the users.
Just by virtue of knowing the notes.
And that's the beauty of the eCache protocol, that you can be incredibly transparent,

(01:28:51):
but still reveal nothing about the actual protocol and transactions.
In terms of the current state, I think we have a system that's naturally very private and naturally very sensitive resistant.
But if you go into the esoteric details, I want to be careful not to say it's perfectly private or perfectly sensitive resistant,

(01:29:15):
because there will be someone saying, well, but there's this and that, and they're right.
And the answer is, if you do notice those things, you know what you should do.
You should mention it, and then you should open up a pull request and suggest how we resolve that.
ScythePunks, Right Code, we're working together. This is why this technology and this idea,

(01:29:39):
the idea of being able to transact at low cost and at high speed on Bitcoin, is something that the world needs that works to emerge
The idea of meritocratic money is something the world needs that is Bitcoin.
The idea of being able to have community custody with sharing eCache working very well with and seamlessly with Bitcoin

(01:30:02):
was needed and that was fed in it.
And Matrix gave this solution around chat,
decentralized and federated,
and it's been operating for over a decade.
And the idea of a user interface to all of this,
being able to access all in one place,
in one user interface,
that's simple and easy to use

(01:30:24):
and uses the best freedom technologies,
but merges into one very, very high-quality UX
is also there.
And that's the FedE app,
and that's why it's essential that we made that.
We are moving towards a path to making that open source as well.
That's a heck of an elevator pitch, I'll say.

(01:30:46):
Well, I need to make it a lot quicker
if it's an elevator pitch.
I think it's like 11 seconds, isn't it?
Yeah, we'll assume this is a very tall building, in this case.
But no, I think that that's great,
especially as we see these trends towards, again,
more censorship on social media.
It's great that we have things like Noster

(01:31:07):
that are offering censorship-resistant alternatives to that.
As we see more financial censorship and repression happening,
I think, again, this is a case where a lot of people in the...
however we want to say, the financially privileged,
wherever they may be in the world,
don't have to deal with this very much.
It's not something that they don't...
They don't worry about getting their bank accounts shut down

(01:31:30):
on an uneven day because they said their president
was a senile buffoon.
In America, you can still, for now, say that.
And you're not going to have all access to the financial system cut off.
But even so, you are being spied on.
We know this through the bravery of whistleblowers
who have come forward and showed us how much our government,

(01:31:53):
even in a place like America, the land of the free,
spies on us, even when you're minding your own business,
just trying to go about your day.
And so the idea that with FETI, with FETIMENT,
with E-cash as a part of that, with Noster as a social layer to that,
you now have this ability to actually do things privately,

(01:32:16):
within your community.
Not that you, you know, privacy...
Why do you need privacy if you have nothing to hide?
Well, as we, those of us who have learned a little bit more know,
privacy is just the ability to selectively reveal oneself to the world, right?
And it seems that these federations give you that ability
while keeping that federation walled off from the outside.

(01:32:40):
The worry I have is that it seems like once governments are quick enough to pick up
that this is actually happening, they may not be huge fans of it.
But I suppose that's also a great way to spot an authoritarian,
is their position on private communities where you can speak freely and privately,
and transact freely and privately.

(01:33:02):
Yeah, I think it's just important to realize that FETI and FETIMENT are tools,
and people can choose to use them the way they want.
They may want the functionality, and they may decide to have a level of transparency.
By default, we always operate in a way where you have default privacy.

(01:33:23):
That's the default assumption.
But if you choose to add transparency, you can.
I think the other thing to understand when you're using the system is that
different people use it in different ways.
Some people purely use it for the conversation and chat, or for the community.
Some people use it for the monetary aspects.

(01:33:45):
Some people use it for all.
Some people are using it in some of the most disadvantaged communities in the world.
Some people are using it because they live under the Oklahoma Farrar Ten regimes.
Some people are thinking about using it for a company and its employees in the west.
That's a tool for better handling company treasury,

(01:34:08):
as opposed to outsourcing it to a third party,
and better handling expense management within the organization.
As opposed to again outsourcing it to multiple third party banks.
This is a tool that over time is going to be used for multiple options.
But the default should be that you use the best freedom technologies,

(01:34:30):
and they tend to have these features.
They should be decentralized and they should be private.
You can't be a freedom technology if you don't have the ability to do those things.
Be decentralized and be private.
If you're centralized and private, you failed.
If you're decentralized but non-private, again, you failed.

(01:34:56):
You need to have the two.
Not all systems have everything they want,
but they all have the potential, the ones that we're using, to get to that point,
if they're not already there and get better.
We're really excited. We're going to keep working on it.
We're going to keep coming up with issues.
We're going to hope that people...

(01:35:19):
We're going to hear the criticisms and be very grateful for hearing them,
and work on them in priority order.
Obviously, someone who's actually using the app day-to-day,
meaningfully will be prioritized higher than someone who has no intention of using it,
doesn't use Bitcoin for payments and gives a suggestion.

(01:35:40):
But it doesn't mean that they won't have a good and valid suggestion as well,
but they should understand that the people who are actually using it,
suggestions are going to be prioritized over the people who are just showing proof of talk over proof of work.
But we welcome all of those and we welcome them with gratitude.

(01:36:01):
Even more, we welcome people to do two things.
Find an alternative product and work on it to provide a better solution
than the one that we've offered and that we're offering,
because competition leads to better outcomes, which is better for everybody in the world.
So please do that.

(01:36:22):
Or contribute.
Compete or contribute.
Those are the best two things.
But if you can't compete, you can't contribute, then comment.
And we'll be happy with that as well.
I think that that's a wonderful note to end on.
And I appreciate, it's a big week for you.
I really appreciate you sharing your scarce time.

(01:36:43):
FETI.XYZ for the main website.
I'll link the Noster and Twitter for yourself and FETI as well.
Anywhere else people should go or any final thoughts?
Yeah, so FETI.XYZ is the best place for FETI.
If you want to find out more about FETI Mint, which is the thing that's really started it

(01:37:06):
and allowed us to make this community custody, you should go to FETIMint.org as well.
But FETI.XYZ, if you have one address, that should be the one.
And there'll be links to there to FETIMint.org as well anyway.
Well, Obi, thank you so much.
This was fascinating.
And congrats in the launch this week.
Can't wait to see the building you guys continue to do.

(01:37:29):
Thank you.
As I said, I feel honored for being part of the Bitcoin community.
I continue to try to be, to serve.
And I am honored for the team I'm working with, the investors I've, who've supported us all the way through all of the, all of the people who have supported us.

(01:37:51):
Social media in every single back-from-conversation in the Bitcoin ecosystem.
And there's someone sticking up for the, for community.
I really appreciate that.
And most of all, I am honored to help the communities we're supporting and to understand that these communities are not only giving us feedback and helping us build this incredible product

(01:38:20):
and hopefully gaining from that, but they're helping us build a product which will eventually, we believe, and we feel very confident we'll be used by people all across the world.
Even if today you don't feel that you needed, the world can change very quickly.
And we're working really hard to be ready for that if and when they're helping.

(01:38:45):
I mean, it doesn't, but trying to build tools that will serve us in the case it does.
Always better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it, I suppose.
Well, Obi, thanks so much for your time.
Thank you.
And look forward to talking to you again soon.
Maybe some karaoke again soon too.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

(01:39:07):
And I think karaoke is a good idea.
I agree.

(01:39:40):
Thank you.

(01:40:10):
And at Walker America on rumble or just go to Bitcoin podcast dot net slash podcast and find links everywhere.
Coin is scarce.
There will only ever be 21 million, but Bitcoin podcasts are abundant.
So thank you for spending your scarce time to listen to another fucking Bitcoin podcast.
Until next time, stay free.

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FEDI: Open-Source Freedom Technology, Community & Trust - Obi Nwosu (Bitcoin Talk on THE Bitcoin Podcast)

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}FEDI: Open-Source Freedom Technology, Community & Trust - Obi Nwosu (Bitcoin Talk on THE Bitcoin Podcast)